Materion Brush Beryllium & Composites, a Materion Corporation (NYSE:
MTRN) business, announced that it qualified and entered into a strategic
manufacturing and marketing partnership with Aristo Cast Inc.

Materion Brush Beryllium & Composites, a Materion Corporation (NYSE: MTRN) business, announced that it qualified and entered into a strategic manufacturing and marketing partnership with Aristo Cast Inc. (Almont, Michigan) for its proprietary AlBeCast® aluminum-beryllium investment castings product line. The two companies initiated their partnership in October 2013.

Aristo Cast is a recognized global leader in complex castings from lightweight materials, especially magnesium alloy investment casting. Aristo Cast has received numerous awards for best in class magnesium castings from the American Foundry Society, the Investment Casting Institute, and the International Magnesium Association.

Leveraging off its lightweight alloy investment casting experience, Aristo Cast provides Materion with a breakthrough shell technology that in qualification proved not only to improve casting quality, but dramatically reduce production costs of aluminum-beryllium investment castings. Shell technology refers to the process of producing the hollow ceramic shells into which molten metal is poured to make the castings.

“Aristo Cast technology represents a game-changing development for the production of AlBeCast,” said Lawrence Ryczek, Vice President and General Manager of Materion Brush Beryllium & Composites.

“With the Aristo Cast shell technology, our expanded capability and world class casting team, we are confident AlBeCast will capture new applications that weren’t possible even two years ago,” he continued. “We are in qualification with a number of aerospace, defense and semiconductor firms seeking to capitalize on this alloy system and casting technology breakthrough. As previously announced, we are in qualification with Lockheed as a supplier for the F-35 Lightning II's Electro-Optical Targeting System.”

Jack Ziemba, President and Owner of Aristo Cast said, “When Materion approached us about partnering with them, we immediately embraced this win-win opportunity. Aristo Cast investment casting technology is recognized as industry leading, and its use with aluminum-beryllium material has been demonstrated to be a great fit. Materion has the resources to grow the reinvigorated AlBeCast product line, and we look forward to working side by side with them to do it.”

Looking at the universe of stocks we cover at Dividend Channel, on 2/17/15, Materion Corp will trade ex-dividend, for its quarterly dividend of $0.085, payable on 3/3/15. As a percentage of MTRN's recent stock price of $37.16, this dividend works out to approximately 0.23%.

Shareholders of Materion Corp looking to boost their income beyond the stock's 0.9% annualized dividend yield can sell the June 2015 covered call at the $40 strike and collect the premium based on the $1.40 bid, which annualizes to an additional 8.4% rate of return against the current stock price (at Stock Options Channel we call this the YieldBoost), for a total of 9.3% annualized rate in the scenario where the stock is not called away. Any upside above $40 would be lost if the stock rises there and is called away, but MTRN shares would have to climb 11.2% from current levels for that to occur, meaning that in the scenario where the stock is called, the shareholder has earned a 15.1% return from this trading level, in addition to any dividends collected before the stock was called.

In trading on Friday, shares of Materion Corp crossed below their 200 day moving average of $34.17, changing hands as low as $34.10 per share. Materion Corp shares are currently trading off about 1.6% on the day.